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5 Outrageous Cases of Pseudoscience You Probably Never Heard About

Pseudoscience is everywhere: unsubstantiated claims passed off as science for the gullible masses.

Instead of the usual rigor and research, these claims are often vague, unprovable and in some cases simply absurd.

Here are a few of the most outrages cases of pseudoscience.

The Pet Psychic

Television network Animal Planet introduced a series in 2002 called the Pet Psychic, hosted by Sonya Fitzpatrick.

Sonya says she can hear the thoughts of animal around her and can even “cross over” to speak with animals after their death. Sonya also offers her services as a psychic pet detective.

The absurdity shows in one particular episode, as Skeptic.com points out, when Sonya makes the prediction that a llama named Tony has some behavioral problems.

Of course, she didn’t come to this conclusion through the visible jerking and flailing of the llama. No, it was her powers.

2012 “Evidence”

The 2012 end of the world myth has conspiracy theorists coming out in droves to offer the latest in “scientific evidence” that seems to confirm the world will indeed end in 2012.

What’s great about this brand of pseudoscience is the wide array of offshoots, with every group having a different theory on how the world will meet its demise.

Originally, the myth centered around the return of a make-believe planet called Nibiru, but 2012 later became synonymous with the end of the Mayan calendar.

Want to learn about other 2012 theories, check out Amazon. There are more than 175 books dedicated to the 2012 myths. Many will offer enough pseudoscience to keep you believing well beyond 2012.

Pyramid Power

For centuries, Egyptian pyramids have been the stuff of legend, but the New Age crowd really took things to the next level with their own brand of Pseudoscience.

To them, pyramids could sanctify drinking water, make plants grow faster and taller and even keep food fresh.

Furthermore, get a few pyramids and you’ll also enjoy better sex, more graphic dreams and other such hogwash. In the 1970s, pyramid power became the subject of many books.

Mystical Crystals

Crystals have been the mythical source of equally ridiculous claims.

Plenty of hippies still rub the stuff on their armpits instead of using deodorant. (Just because you’re used to the way you smell, it doesn’t mean you don’t stink.)

Of course, there’s the crystal ball, still employed by psychics around the world. But others have written books claiming that crystals will increase the positive energy in your home while deflecting the bad energy of those negative Nancys who’ve been dropping by.

The Mozart Effect

If you play Mozart next to your child’s crib, chances are you’ve heard of the UC Irvine study, which claims that diving into the world of Mozart can actually make you smarter.

The study took 36 participants and found that those who listened to Mozart before a task did much better than those who only heard silence. The study concluded that Mozart could actually increase your IQ by eight or nine points.

However, the results of that study have been widely criticized by the academic and scientific community as a whole.

Many claim the results were misleading and that researchers didn’t examine what role the participants’ diets, posture or the time of day they took the tests played in the results.

What’s Next?

No doubt there is more pseudoscience out there and more on the way. We tend to easily fall into belief when something ridiculous lands on the shelf of our local bookstore.

Think “The Secret.”

Pseudoscience has the power to fool, but use some common sense before you pull out that debit card.

It’s easy to throw everything that doesn’t fit the scientific method into a bag called “hogwash”. The trouble is, scientific method has a serious fault – it seeks 100% objectivity and tries to achieve it by repeatability of experiment. To make experiment repeatable it must be simplified. It is achievable when working with inanimate matter, but practicly impossible when it comes to researching human minds and their interaction. Scientists simply can’t objectively repeat an experiment because the subject itself is changing from moment to moment – like in the proverb that you never enter the same river twice.

Because of that impossibility to repeat scientists dismiss such matters as unscientific. And I agree – the phenomenas lie outside science, therefore are unscientific.

Althought that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily unreal…

Rogerstill71

I find that Mozart’s music is very relaxing (for the most part ) and that might have an influence on study. It may be that it occupies one’s subconscious mind and keeps out the day-to-day worries or preoccupations, so one’s conscious mind may assimilate one’s studies better.

texasace00

These are all true, stop being a buzzkill

texasace00

Things mentioned above are rarely original, just recycled in a different package, same premise, but if you just apply common sense first, before you attempt to answer anything with scientific method, you can save yourself a whole lot of time. People want to be fooled.